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dome officials were worried about a power outage several months before the big game.
• An Oct. 15 memo released by the Louisiana Stadium & Exposition District, which oversees the Superdome, says tests on the dome's electrical feeders showed they had "some decay and a chance of failure."
• Entergy New Orleans, the company that supplies the stadium with power, and the structure's engineering staff "had concerns regarding the reliability of the Dome service from Entergy's connection point to the Dome," the memo says. Those concerns were due in part to "circumstances that have previously occurred with the electrical service regarding transient spikes and loads."
• The memo also cites 2011 blackouts that struck Candlestick Park, where the San Francisco 49ers were playing a nationally televised Monday night football game, as a reason for ordering the tests.
• The board later authorized spending nearly $1 million on Superdome improvements, including more than $600,000 for upgrading the dome's electrical feeder cable system.
• ___
Son of slain Minneapolis business owner joins Obama, leads state's push for gun law changes
• MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. (AP) -- Sami Rahamim has committed statistics about gun deaths to memory, folding them into sentences that make his case. He talks like a lawyer, not a high school senior -- no pauses or filler, no public trace of his pain.
• On Sept. 27, Rahamim's father, Reuven Rahamim, was shot and killed along with five others at Accent Signage Systems in Minneapolis, the company he founded, by an ex-worker who recently had been fired. In the months since, Sami Rahamim has become a 17-year-old lobbyist for reducing gun violence.
• Rahamim has been at the state Capitol nearly every day for a month, missing school to push for legislation that would boost background checks and tighten gun regulations in Minnesota. He's spoken at churches, synagogues and gun violence forums.
• And Monday, Rahamim sat two chairs from President Barack Obama as part of a round-table discussion on how best to reduce gun violence, before the president took his push to tighten gun laws on national TV from Minneapolis. Rahamim shared his story and ideas with Obama -- not just as a victim, but as a committed advocate.
• "Nobody would blame him if he were curled up in a corner crying even until this (Continued on page 32)
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